Archive

So, having said in my last post that I hadn’t posted for ages, the truth was, that I had; and it wasn’t me not posting, but my mechanism for remotely posting things had gone belly up without me realising. Turns out, it looks like it’s my hosting company that have screwed around with things a bit.

I had to hunt around the PHP forums to understand why my connection was not working properly, which I eventually found and fix, and it looks like everything is workin again. What I did realise in the process though, was that I had accidentally posted the same back post, twice! So, nice going there then.

Anyway, it looks like I have got everything back up and running again, and even may have improved somethings slightly (no more cron calling wget to fetch a page to download the latest posts for me – looks like everything should just be done by a cron call to php now. Much simpler, much neater).

If you’re reading this, then everything looks like it’s pretty much OK.

Bloody hell, it’s been weeks since I last blogged. There are some many things going on at the moment, I’m kind of losing touch.

Lets see if I can remember….

Kingston Regatta – I raced at Kingston Regatta – twice. Once as Novice Double Sculls and once as Senior 4 Quad Sculls – got knocked out in the first heat both times, but that’s not biggie – I’m just pleased I got my first race in, in two years.

Molesey Regatta – Was supposed to race, it got called off because of the floods.

Capsize – On the day that we didn’t go to Molesey, we had a fun day training at the reservoir instead (Molesey was the last thing we were supposed to do before our summer break). Held our own mini regatta, and I managed to capsize the double that I was in. Done that twice now, both doubles, not once in a single. Oops – the squad aren’t letting us live this one down, I think.

Joined Facebook – Yep, I’m on facebook now as my friend Trudie in Australia asked me to. Getting slowly addicted. Have also attracted several people from school that I don’t really want to know anymore – have come up with game wiht friends to try and get as many of these people as possible; and have invented variant of this game called “Facebook Top Trumps”.

I’ve bought a flat! – Strangist and scariest thing I’ve done in some time. Still in early stages, so everyone can stop asking me if I’ve moved in yet.

I need to relearn Spanish – Doing stuff with work to do with Spain – need to remember how to speak and understand it as some of them don’t speak English. Doh!

Comment Spam Filtering – The list of banned words and phrases for comments and trackbacks keeps getting bigger – yesterday, I removed over 11,000 comments in one quick query (that was over 90% of the comments still needing approval!).

Whilst trying to compile the BeFS Kernel module for Linux last night, I discovered that it is already included in the default module build for Fedora Core 5. Which was nice…..

Anyway, I’ve just checked now, and it was also included in a Fedora Core 6 VM Image that I have, which I haven’t tinkered with, so it looks like it’s part of the standard build. The only downside is that it is a read-only filesystem at the moment, so I still can’t compile Haiku and release it to my hard disk using Linux. Damn.

I am starting to get slightly annoyed with the programming language that we use at work – Progress 4GL (9.1D).

Recently, I’ve been informed of/discovered two different “features” of string handling that really annoy me. There are other features that Progress does that I actually find helpful – like case in-sensitive string comparisons, but these two take too much control away from what I want.

Data Import – If you have a file that has multiple fields per line, each separated by a certain delimiter (e.g. a CSV file), Progress automatically removes any leading spaces for each field that it imports when using the “IMPORT DELIMITER” command. For example, imagine a file contains this line: “abc|123| xyz”, and I import this data with the command “IMPORT DELIMITER ‘|’ vFirstString vInteger vSecondString.” (vFirstString, vInteger and vSecondString are all variables), you would expect the following result: vFirstString == “abc”, vInteger == 123 and vSecondString == ” xyz” – except this is not what happens. The value that you get for vSecondString is “xyz” – Progress automaticaly strips the leading space.

I hate these things, and the second one has caused me to waste an hour of my time working out what is happening. The language should not corrupt my data in that way. I imagine that there are flags you can specify that turn this behaviour off (like you can with case in-sensitive string comparisons) – but I think it should be the other way around – you should specify them if you want to turn them on.

I must admit, I still like the look of it. I like the interface, I love the technicals. All very nice.

But there are somethings that the iPhone is missing, and they are simple little things that I cannot do without. The things that my phones have done for years now, things that I need. Unfortunately, the list gets longer with every review I read.

Here we are so far:

MMS – You can’t send pictures? Rubbish!

No voice dialling – So how am I supposed to stay legal whilst using my handsfree set in the car? To be honest, my last phone, a Samsung e720 was missing this feature (but still had bluetooth – just like the iPhone) – it was an absolute pain in the arse. It caused me to break the law many times by having to dial and then use my bluetooth headset to actually do the talking.

No multiple SMS recipients – This is just obsurd. Even my crappy Nokia 1100 handset can do this. I bought it because it was dirt cheap and I can drop it whilst I’m out rowing and not care.

No sending contacts – Forget it, you can’t do it

The Lock-In – Jesus – that’s just ridiculous. I know it hasn’t been announced who will be carrying it in the UK yet, but still, that’s just obsurd.

Video Recording – WHat I love about my phone is that it’s just there. For those off-hand, unplanned, moments I wished I had a camera or video camera for, I do. I reach into my pocket, and pull out my phone. OK, the quality is probably a bit crap, but I don’t care because it’s record my moment forever. If I can’t record video, that’s just shit.

Custom Ringtones – Oh come on! – I don’t want to get stuck with something that someone else has decided is the best choice for me – I want to choose. My old Nokia 8210 could do that way back in the year 2000 – and I’m racking my brain as to what other phones could do that beforehand – I’m certain the 3210 could, and I’m not sure but the 5110 possibly could (and probably the 6110 as well in that case).

At this rate, I simply cannot buy the iPhone – it just seems like an overpriced brick that can’t do much more (phone wise) than my old Philips Diga.

It seems like the iPhone should have been created as an internet appliance, and Apple should have forgotten about the phone bit – that’s the bit that they have fucked up on. At least that way, no one would have to hold up something the size of the spade to their face just to talk.

This is more of a reminder to myself, but somebody might find it useful eventually.

When setting the size of the virtual memory on BeOS R5 x86, do not set it to a value that will overflow the value of a signed 32-Bit integer. The number of bytes must not be more than 2^31 (it’s 31 not 32 because it’s a signed integer).

Obviously the designers of the Virtual Memory preference pane didn’t for see large swap files. Never mind, it was the late nineties that they designed the system in.

Anyway, another good way to check the size of the file is to cat the file:

/boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/virtual_memory

The second line of this file shows the size of the memory in bytes.

Also, one final tip. To check the size of the swap file, do not open the virtual memory pane -this will reset the value back to the default value.

Simply type this is a terminal:

ls -lh /var/swap

This should then should you (in human readable format) the size of the file.